New technologies and the falling cost of advanced features highlight a year of storage alternatives 1. Solid-state storage. Many of the major hard drive vendors and SAN vendors announced flash-based solid-state drives (SSDs) this year. In enterprise systems, SSDs can accelerate performance, creating a tier 0 with better performance than the standard tier 1 15,000-rpm drives, and at lower operating costs. In laptops, SSDs offer power savings and greater shock resistance than standard hard drives. Although adoption has been slow in both areas due to very high price per gigabyte compared with spinning disk, prices are dropping rapidly as volumes grow. As vendors address the issue of limited lifespans for SSDs in enterprise systems, adoption should accelerate, though initial adoption will probably be for small tier 0 arrays to replace expensive cache memory.2. iSCSI. As iSCSI becomes mainstream, functionality and ease of use continue to get better. iSCSI attracts a lot of attention because it can run over a standard 1Gbps Ethernet network without expensive HBAs and Fibre Channel switches. Furthermore, many SAN vendors offer iSCSI connectivity options on their SAN systems, providing high-end features (from replication and snapshots to automated data migration and thin provisioning) at lower costs with the option to upgrade to Fibre Channel where performance is a higher priority.3. Low-end NAS boxes. Using SATA drives and inexpensive RAID adapters, many vendors are offering inexpensive, compact NAS systems with capacities of 1TB to 4TB (costing less than $700 for 2TB, and less than $300 for 1TB). Small businesses and even home users can afford a NAS system to share files and back up PCs. 4. High-end features in low-cost SAN and NAS systems. Features once seen only in a select few high-end, enterprise-class systems (such as thin provisioning and creating special high-speed volumes that use only the outermost tracks of each disk) are now becoming available on less expensive systems from smaller vendors. As smaller vendors find ways to provide innovative features at low cost, the bigger vendors have to work even harder to find new ways to keep their customers happy.5. Adoption of disk-to-disk backup continues to grow. There are so many issues revolving around getting data back off of tape, especially if it’s stored off-site, that many organizations now have three layers of storage: online high-performance storage, near-line secondary storage for restoring lost files or whole servers, and off-line backups in case of dire extremity only.6. Many vendors now offering de-duplication. De-duplication used to be a very specialized feature offered by Data Domain and a couple of other vendors. In 2008, many vendors announced de-duplication capabilities, not only for backup systems, but in some cases, for near-line storage. 7. Storage in the cloud. Amazon is offering S3 (Simple Storage Service), EMC is offering systems to enable enterprises to create their own storage clouds, and companies like SpiderOak and Carbonite offer backup services for less then $100 per year. Fears of lack of availability during Internet outages are offset by universal access from anywhere and the ability to bypass storage hardware investments.8. 1.5TB SATA hard drives at $130. Capacities continue to grow at a fantastic rate, with 1.5TB drives dwindling in price from more than $450 to less than $150 in a year or so. Uses for all that storage abound, with multimedia files from podcasts and Webcasts, security video, e-mail archives, and disk-based backups of every other type of enterprise document. As capacities continue to increase and prices drop, the biggest problem will be managing all that data.9. Fibre Channel hangs on. iSCSI enthusiasts, Infiniband advocates, and FCoE promoters keep predicting the death of Fibre Channel, but prices for FC continue to drop fast enough to fight off the challengers, and experienced FC storage admins continue to trust in what they know. 10. Lots of green hype, not much substance. Between Al Gore fans and IT business managers looking for ways to cut costs, there is a lot of interest in green systems, in storage as well as servers. Unfortunately, many early “green” products show progress mainly in re-written marketing materials rather than real advances in efficiency. Typical of this is the power savings touted for SSDs in laptops. Although it’s true that SSDs use much less power than hard disk drives, they’re really only in fourth or fifth place as power consumers in laptops, behind the screen, CPU, memory, and graphics adapter (in systems with discrete graphics cards, at least). An SSD that uses 5 percent of the power of a hard disk may only make a 10-minute difference in battery life, depending on the applications in use.